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October 11, 2007
Ulteo Financed To Launch Virtualized Desktop and SaaS platform
Ulteo's new virtualized desktop service is taking shape, and so is the company by the same name.
After initially self-financing, Ulteo has raised €400K from private investors, including Daniel Zumino, who is a long time French business angel. For example, he was an early investor in VistaPrint, an online business-card printing company, which went on to raise capital from Sofinnova and Highland Capital Partners, among others, and is now a $1.8B company traded on Nasdaq.
Another early investor and advisor is Alain Revah who brings experience in startups in the US. He contacted Duval by email when he learned that the "Linux legend" had parted ways with Mandriva and was going to start a new project, they've been working together since. (We reported Ulteo's formation here.)
Revah convinced Duval to bring in a CEO, Thierry Koehrlen, who was most recently at Intalio, a VC-backed open source business process management startup in Silicon Valley.
Below you will see a screen shot of Ulteo running access to Adobe Illustrator, that Duval sent through, and pick up what else was said in our interview with the founding team this past week by Skype and by phone.
Koehrlen was also an early investor in Duval's last venture Mandrakesoft, an emerging Linux distribution at the time, which eventually became Mandriva. (See recent post on Mandriva).
"I immediately wanted to be an advisor for Gael when he started the project in early 2006. I got hooked and decided to accept the CEO position that they offered me," said Koehrlen.
In Koehrlen's view Ulteo has all the "key attributes" of a high potential startup. He listed them: it has a "serial entrepreneur founding team, a big vision with multiple potential revenue streams, and structural market trends with lots of players that have a vested interest in helping Ulteo succeed".
Timely Concept
Ulteo offers broadband users access to a desktop pre-loaded with applications and components, via the browser.
Duval said: "We want to simplify the user's experience on the PC, so we plan to offer as many software applications as we possibly can. You can choose and use them without needing to install them. Just click and run. And work or have fun!"
The way it sounds to us (we didn't get to try it yet) is that it is an alternative to, but also can be a complement to, your current PC installation.
Revah believes that users struggle in the face of multiple hardware configurations, OSes, and software vendors. "Ulteo is trying to simplify and reduce hardware/software friction," he suggested.
This reporter is not up to speed on desktop virtualization, but the idea to offer a mass market of users access to productivity applications through a browser, or alternatively a thin client, has been in the tech world for some time.
In the enterprise market, software as a service (SaaS) companies, like salesforce.com, have found a model, as Citrix did before that with a proprietary client.
Consumers in the meantime are getting used to accessing email, blogging tools, and some of the new Web 2.0 personal productivity tools via hosted applications.
In a sign that there is interest in something more, Duval said that 14K people have already registered to give it a try when it goes to public beta. He made made a point of saying that Ulteo is still open for registrations.
An earlier alarm:clock euro article mentioned Ulteo in the context of Nivio, a Swiss/Indian venture, but the founding team corrected us on that view, saying that "the technology is closer to virtualization rather than to any of the so-called webOS companies".
They point to Moka5, a Silicon Valley venture that raised $15M in VC this summer, as being in the same category (see sister site alarm:clock's report here).
Some of the advantages that Ulteo says it can offer is that users do not have worry about viruses, updates, and backups. Users could also try out new applications without downloading hazards, like spyware.
The disadvantage of not having your apps on your hard drive is that you cannot use them when you lose your Internet access. Duval's response: "Our approach is to offer both a system within the web browser and a virtualized system under Windows (for offline mode). We have a very efficient virtual machine."
The whole thing will sync automaticallywhen a connection is re-established, he said.
It sounds ambitious but the current private testing phase will go some way to proving whether or not the systesm that Ulteo's team has put together using equipment from various suppliers can handle the load.
So how much will it cost? "We’ll offer a free version loaded with enough apps to get started. As for premium apps it will depend on the result of our talks with various software publishers and what kind of deal they offer for SAAS mode," said Duval.
The company has 12 developers and is looking to hire more, talented ones that have expertise in Windows servers, Unix/Linux, said Duval. A marketing talent is also on its list of wants.
The next stage of development is to establish a board and raise more capital. Duval hopes to bring together "a good mix of funds and companies, such as hardware makers.
Duval and Revah described other R&D projects in the works that they don't want to see written here. We think it is safe to say that Ulteo is more than a single-product startup.
View - Ulteo
Thank-you for the interview. And thanks for reading the alarm:clock euro.
Posted on October 11, 2007 01:41 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Permalink
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